First recipe post! Pancakes! I’m not a master chef or anything, I can’t make drawings or designs out of pancakes, but I think the ones I do make taste pretty bitchin’. And that’s the most important to me, is the taste. Chocolate chips make everything better too :)So without further ado, let’s get started!

Just in case you still needed convincing… 😉

What are you going to need for pancakes?

Well, to make 2 medium-to-large-ish pancakes, you’ll need:

Dry ingredients…

1/2 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

…and wet ingredients…

1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon melted butter

1 egg

Okay, you have all the stuff you need…now what?

I like to combine the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately.

Dry stuff in the mixing bowl, wet stuff in the measuring cup

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix the wet ingredients until it’s consistent.

Then mix your dry and wet together in the bowl to make the batter.

Add your chocolate chips if you want (I usually add around 1/4 of a cup for this much batter) and mix until your batter is smooth.

Pan should be on low/medium heat, with…let’s say 1-2 tablespoons of oil.

Add enough batter to the pan to make medium-ish pancakes. Flip when the edges look a bit dry and bubbles have risen in the center. You can also lift up the edge of the pancake and check for brown-ness.

Rinse and repeat as needed.

Now for the toppings!

I may come off as a foodie snob for saying this, but ever since trying real maple syrup, that’s all I can ever use now. None of that high-fructose corn syrup. Even I can taste the difference, and I’m the type of person who can’t tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and wine-in-a-box. Leslie Knope gets it:

Ok, maybe I’m not that bad…but probably pretty close

Now that the obvious is out of the way…let’s get on to other toppings.

I haven’t been particularly adventurous in this area. I know other people sprinkle their pancakes with powdered sugar or dump a bucket of strawberries on them, but the most I’ve ever really done is jam.

Lately, I’ve been spooning a few lumps of tayberry jam on top of my pancakes. It used to be raspberry, but I ran out of that, and I had tayberry jam sitting on my shelf, so I thought alright, why not give it a shot.

It’s SO good.

I had no idea what tayberries were until I went to visit a friend in Seattle. Apparently, it’s some cross between a Scottish raspberry and an Aurora blackberry, but it’s 100% awesome flavor. If you’re interested, you can read more about them here.

If you’re interested in trying it out, but don’t know where to get it (this seems like a pretty regional thing–like I said, I’d never heard of or seen this prior to visiting Seattle), this is the one that I have, from Johnson Berry Farm. I feel I should warn people that it does have little seeds.